Windows Phone Thoughts: Make A Plan And Go: Twiddlebit's Pocket Plan Reviewed

Scheduling Tasks
The value of a tool such as Pocket Plan is mostly measured in its ability to automate much of the scheduling process. Having to edit dozens of start/end dates because of a single task slipping would leave the product little more helpful than a plan written on paper or stored in an Excel spreadsheet. Fortunately, Pocket Plan measures up to the larger desktop applications in this regard with only a few features missing.

Tasks are scheduled with three criteria in mind: rate, work, and date. Rate is the resource units/day assigned to the task, while work is the amount of effort in man-days required to complete the task. Date refers to the amount of time required to move from 0% to 100% complete. Plan's scheduling algorithm is the simple formula work = rate X date. For each task you select two of the criteria and set their values and Plan automatically calculates the third.

Additionally, each task can be constrained to start as soon/late as possible, with a fixed start and/or end date, to start before/after a fixed date, or to end before/after a fixed date. Finally, each task can be marked as dependent on another task's completion. These are the same constraints available in Microsoft Project (although they are named differently) and allow for maximum flexibility in mapping real scheduling requirements to the plan.

The effects of setting these are very useful in practice. The results of adding or deleting a task, changing the number of resources assigned to a task, or changing the scope of a task can immediately be seen on all subsequent tasks and the plan as a whole. This allows for easily testing proposed changes without having to propagate those changes manually throughout the plan.

Baselines are another feature supported by Pocket Plan that can help monitor the progress of a project. Baselines can be generated at any time from the Options menu and can be set for a single task, all non-baselined tasks, all tasks not started, or all tasks. The baseline is basically a snapshot of the task's start and end dates that is stored independent of the task's actual start and end dates. Both the actual start and end date (which can change during the course of the project) and the baseline can be displayed on the Gantt View simultaneously. This allows for easy tracking of slippage or slack within the plan. Unlike Microsoft Project, only a single baseline can be saved for each task. This could be a problem in large projects but the ability to set baselines on only specific or unstarted tasks mitigates much of the limitation.

Missing from Pocket Plan's scheduling capabilities is any kind of resource leveling. Resource leveling allows schedules to automatically adjust for maximum resource utilization. At its simplest, resource leveling helps prevent a resource from being over-allocated. Pocket Plan does not prevent a resource from being assigned to two or more tasks simultaneously that would exceed 100% of its rate value. It does, however, make note of the overage in the Resource Graph. Thus, planners have to do a bit more work to avoid such conditions in complicated plans.